_PREPARATION FOR MARRIAGE._
MISS LILLIE ELLIS was sitting upstairs in her virgin bower, which was
now converted into a tumultuous, seething caldron of millinery and
mantua-making, such as usually precedes a wedding. To be sure, orders
had been forthwith despatched to Paris for the bridal regimentals,
and for a good part of the _trousseau_; but that did not seem in the
least to stand in the way of the time-honored confusion of sewing
preparations at home, which is supposed to waste the strength and
exhaust the health of every bride elect.
Whether young women, while disengaged, do not have proper
under-clothing, or whether they contemplate marriage as an awful
gulf which swallows up all future possibilities of replenishing a
wardrobe,—certain it is that no sooner is a girl engaged to be married
than there is a blind and distracting rush and pressure and haste to
make up for her immediately a stock of articles, which, up to that
hour, she has managed to live very comfortably and respectably without.
It is astonishing to behold the number of inexpressible things with
French names which unmarried young ladies never think of wanting, but
which there is a desperate push to supply, and have ranged in order,
the moment the matrimonial state is in contemplation.
Therefore it was that the virgin bower of Lillie was knee-deep in a
tangled mass of stuffs of various hues and description; that the sharp
sound of tearing off breadths resounded there; that Miss Clippins and
Miss Snippings and Miss Nippins were sewing there day and night; that
a sewing-machine was busily rattling in mamma’s room; and that there
were all sorts of pinking and quilling, and braiding and hemming,
and whipping and ruffling, and over-sewing and cat-stitching and
hem-stitching, and other female mysteries, going on.
As for Lillie, she lay in a loose _negligé_ on the bed, ready every
five minutes to be called up to have something measured, or tried on,
or fitted; and to be consulted whether there should be fifteen or
sixteen tucks and then an insertion, or sixteen tucks and a series of
puffs. Her labors wore upon her; and it was smilingly observed by Miss
Clippins across to Miss Nippins, that Miss Lillie was beginning to show
her “engagement bones.” In the midst of these preoccupations, a letter
was handed to her by the giggling chambermaid. It was a thick letter,
directed in a bold honest hand. Miss Lillie took it with a languid
little yawn, finished the last sentences in a chapter of the novel she
was reading, and then leisurely broke the seal and glanced it over. It
was the one that the enraptured John had spent his morning in writing.
“Miss Ellis, now, if you’ll try on this jacket—oh! I beg your pardon,”
said Miss Clippins, observing the letter, “we can wait, _of course_;”
and then all three laughed as if something very pleasant was in their
minds.
“No,” said Lillie, giving the letter a toss; “it’ll _keep_;” and she
stood up to have a jaunty little blue jacket, with its pluffy bordering
of swan’s down, fitted upon her.
“It’s too bad, now, to take you from your letter,” said Miss Clippins,
with a sly nod.
“I’m sure you take it philosophically,” said Miss Nippins, with a
giggle.
“Why shouldn’t I?” said the divine Lillie. “I get one every day; and
it’s all the old story. I’ve heard it ever since I was born.”
“Well, now, to be sure you have. Let’s see,” said Miss Clippins, “this
is the seventy-fourth or seventy-fifth offer, was it?”
“Oh, you must ask mamma! she keeps the lists: I’m sure I don’t trouble
my head,” said the little beauty; and she looked so natty and jaunty
when she said it, just arching her queenly white neck, and making soft,
downy dimples in her cheeks as she gave her fresh little childlike
laugh; turning round and round before the looking-glass, and issuing
her orders for the fitting of the jacket with a precision and real
interest which showed that there _were_ things in the world which
didn’t become old stories, even if one had been used to them ever since
one was born.
Lillie never was caught napping when the point in question was the fit
of her clothes.
When released from the little blue jacket, there was a rose-colored
morning-dress to be tried on, and a grave discussion as to whether the
honiton lace was to be set on plain or frilled.
So important was this case, that mamma was summoned from the
sewing-machine to give her opinion. Mrs. Ellis was a fat, fair, rosy
matron of most undisturbed conscience and digestion, whose main
business in life had always been to see to her children’s clothes. She
had brought up Lillie with faithful and religious zeal; that is to say,
she had always ruffled her underclothes with her own hands, and darned
her stockings, sick or well; and also, as before intimated, kept a list
of her offers, which she was ready in confidential moments to tell off
to any of her acquaintance. The question of ruffled or plain honiton
was of such vital importance, that the whole four took some time in
considering it in its various points of view.
“Sarah Selfridge had hers ruffled,” said Lillie.
“And the effect was perfectly sweet,” said Miss Clippins.
“Perhaps, Lillie, you had better have it ruffled,” said mamma.
“But three rows laid on plain has such a lovely effect,” said Miss
Nippins.
“Perhaps, then, she had better have three rows laid on plain,” said
mamma.
“Or she might have one row ruffled on the edge, with three rows laid on
plain, with a satin fold,” said Miss Clippins. “That’s the way I fixed
Miss Elliott’s.”
“That would be a nice way,” said mamma. “Perhaps, Lillie, you’d better
have it so.”
“Oh! come now, all of you, just hush,” said Lillie. “I know just how I
want it done.”
The words may sound a little rude and dictatorial; but Lillie had the
advantage of always looking so pretty, and saying dictatorial things
in such a sweet voice, that everybody was delighted with them; and she
took the matter of arranging the trimming in hand with a clearness of
head which showed that it was a subject to which she had given mature
consideration. Mrs. Ellis shook her fat sides with a comfortable
motherly chuckle.
“Lillie always did know exactly what she wanted: she’s a smart little
thing.”
And, when all the trying on and arranging of folds and frills and pinks
and bows was over, Lillie threw herself comfortably upon the bed, to
finish her letter.
Shrewd Miss Clippins detected the yawn with which she laid down the
missive.
“Seems to me your letters don’t meet a very warm reception,” she said.
“Well! every day, and such long ones!” Lillie answered, turning over
the pages. “See there,” she went on, opening a drawer, “What a heap of
them! I can’t see, for my part, what any one can want to write a letter
every day to anybody for. John is such a goose about me.”
[Illustration: “Shrewd Miss Clippins detected the yawn.”]
“He’ll get over it after he’s been married six months,” said Miss
Clippins, nodding her head with the air of a woman that has seen life.
“I’m sure I shan’t care,” said Lillie, with a toss of her pretty head.
“It’s _borous_ any way.”
Our readers may perhaps imagine, from the story thus far, that our
little Lillie is by no means the person, in reality, that John supposes
her to be, when he sits thinking of her with such devotion, and writing
her such long, “borous” letters.
She is not. John is in love not with the actual Lillie Ellis, but with
that ideal personage who looks like his mother’s picture, and is the
embodiment of all his mother’s virtues. The feeling, as it exists in
John’s mind, is not only a most respectable, but in fact a truly divine
one, and one that no mortal man ought to be ashamed of. The love that
quickens all the nature, that makes a man twice manly, and makes him
aspire to all that is high, pure, sweet, and religious,—is a feeling
so sacred, that no unworthiness in its object can make it any less
beautiful. More often than not it is spent on an utter vacancy. Men and
women both pass through this divine initiation,—this sacred inspiration
of our nature,—and find, when they have come into the innermost shrine,
where the divinity ought to be, that there is no god or goddess
there; nothing but the cold black ashes of commonplace vulgarity and
selfishness. Both of them, when the grand discovery has been made, do
well to fold their robes decently about them, and make the best of
the matter. If they cannot love, they can at least be friendly. They
can tolerate, as philosophers; pity, as Christians; and, finding just
where and how the burden of an ill-assorted union galls the least, can
then and there strap it on their backs, and walk on, not only without
complaint, but sometimes in a cheerful and hilarious spirit.
Not a word of all this thinks our friend John, as he sits longing,
aspiring, and pouring out his heart, day after day, in letters that
interrupt Lillie in the all-important responsibility of getting her
wardrobe fitted.
Shall we think this smooth little fair-skinned Lillie is a cold-hearted
monster, because her heart does not beat faster at these letters which
she does not understand, and which strike her as unnecessarily prolix
and prosy? Why should John insist on telling her his feelings and
opinions on a vast variety of subjects that she does not care a button
for? She doesn’t know any thing about ritualism and anti-ritualism;
and, what’s more, she doesn’t care. She hates to hear so much about
religion. She thinks it’s pokey. John may go to any church he pleases,
for all her. As to all that about his favorite poems, she don’t like
poetry,—never could,—don’t see any sense in it; and John _will_ be
quoting ever so much in his letters. Then, as to the love parts,—it may
be all quite new and exciting to John; but she has, as she said, heard
that story over and over again, till it strikes her as quite a matter
of course. Without doubt the whole world is a desert where she is
not: the thing has been asserted, over and over, by so many gentlemen
of credible character for truth and veracity, that she is forced to
believe it; and she cannot see why John is particularly to be pitied
on this account. He is in no more desperate state about her than the
rest of them; and secretly Lillie has as little pity for lovers’ pangs
as a nice little white cat has for mice. They amuse her; they are her
appropriate recreation; and she pats and plays with each mouse in
succession, without any comprehension that it may be a serious thing
for him.
When Lillie was a little girl, eight years old, she used to sell her
kisses through the slats of the fence for papers of candy, and thus
early acquired the idea that her charms were a capital to be employed
in trading for the good things of life. She had the misfortune—and a
great one it is—to have been singularly beautiful from the cradle, and
so was praised and exclaimed over and caressed as she walked through
the streets. She was sent for, far and near; borrowed to be looked at;
her picture taken by photographers. If one reflects how many foolish
and inconsiderate people there are in the world, who have no scruple in
making a pet and plaything of a pretty child, one will see how this one
unlucky lot of being beautiful in childhood spoiled Lillie’s chances of
an average share of good sense and goodness. The only hope for such a
case lies in the chance of possessing judicious parents. Lillie had not
these. Her father was a shrewd grocer, and nothing more; and her mother
was a competent cook and seamstress. While he traded in sugar and salt,
and she made pickles and embroidered under-linen, the pretty Lillie was
educated as pleased Heaven.
Pretty girls, unless they have wise mothers, are more educated by
the opposite sex than by their own. Put them where you will, there
is always some _man_ busying himself in their instruction; and the
burden of masculine teaching is generally about the same, and might be
stereotyped as follows: “You don’t need to be or do any thing. Your
business in life is to look pretty, and amuse us. You don’t need to
study: you know all by nature that a woman need to know. You are, by
virtue of being a pretty woman, superior to any thing we can teach
you; and we wouldn’t, for the world, have you any thing but what you
are.” When Lillie went to school, this was what her masters whispered
in her ear as they did her sums for her, and helped her through her
lessons and exercises, and looked into her eyes. This was what her
young gentlemen friends, themselves delving in Latin and Greek and
mathematics, told her, when they came to recreate from their severer
studies in her smile. Men are held to account for talking sense.
Pretty women are told that lively nonsense is their best sense. Now
and then, an admirer bolder than the rest ventured to take Lillie’s
education more earnestly in hand, and recommended to her just a little
reading,—enough to enable her to carry on conversation, and appear
to know something of the ordinary topics discussed in society,—but
informed her, by the by, that there was no sort of need of being either
profound or accurate in these matters, as the mistakes of a pretty
woman had a grace of their own.
At seventeen, Lillie graduated from Dr. Sibthorpe’s school with a
“finished education.” She had, somehow or other, picked her way
through various “ologies” and exercises supposed to be necessary for a
well-informed young lady. She wrote a pretty hand, spoke French with a
good accent, and could turn a sentimental note neatly; “and that, my
dear,” said Dr. Sibthorpe to his wife, “is all that a woman needs, who
so evidently is intended for wife and mother as our little Lillie.” Dr.
Sibthorpe, in fact, had amused himself with a semi-paternal flirtation
with his pupil during the whole course of her school exercises, and
parted from her with tears in his eyes, greatly to her amusement; for
Lillie, after all, estimated his devotion at just about what it was
worth. It amused her to see him make a fool of himself.
Of course, the next thing was—to be married; and Lillie’s life now
became a round of dressing, dancing, going to watering-places,
travelling, and in other ways seeking the fulfilment of her destiny.
She had precisely the accessible, easy softness of manner that
leads every man to believe that he may prove a favorite, and her
run of offers became quite a source of amusement. Her arrival at
watering-places was noted in initials in the papers; her dress on
every public occasion was described; and, as acknowledged queen of
love and beauty, she had everywhere her little court of men and women
flatterers. The women flatterers around a belle are as much a part of
the _cortége_ as the men. They repeat the compliments they hear, and
burn incense in the virgin’s bower at hours when the profaner sex may
not enter.
The life of a petted creature consists essentially in being deferred
to, for being pretty and useless. A petted child runs a great risk,
if it is ever to outgrow childhood; but a pet woman is a perpetual
child. The pet woman of society is everybody’s toy. Everybody looks
at her, admires her, praises and flatters her, stirs her up to play
off her little airs and graces for their entertainment; and passes
on. Men of profound sense encourage her to chatter nonsense for their
amusement, just as we delight in the tottering steps and stammering
mispronunciations of a golden-haired child. When Lillie has been in
Washington, she has had judges of the supreme court and secretaries
of state delighted to have her give her opinions in their respective
departments. Scholars and literary men flocked around her, to the
neglect of many a more instructed woman, satisfied that she knew enough
to blunder agreeably on every subject.
Nor is there any thing in the Christian civilization of our present
century that condemns the kind of life we are describing, as in any
respect unwomanly or unbecoming. Something very like it is in a measure
considered as the appointed rule of attractive young girls till they
are married.
Lillie had numbered among her admirers many lights of the Church. She
had flirted with bishops, priests, and deacons,—who, none of them,
would, for the world, have been so ungallant as to quote to her such
dreadful professional passages as, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead
while she liveth.”
In fact, the clergy, when off duty, are no safer guides of attractive
young women than other mortal men; and Lillie had so often seen their
spiritual attentions degenerate into downright, temporal love-making,
that she held them in as small reverence as the rest of their sex.
Only one dreadful John the Baptist of her acquaintance, one of
the camel’s-hair-girdle and locust-and-wild-honey species, once
encountering Lillie at Saratoga, and observing the ways and manners
of the court which she kept there, took it upon him to give her a
spiritual admonition.
“Miss Lillie,” he said, “I see no chance for the salvation of your
soul, unless it should please God to send the small-pox upon you. I
think I shall pray for that.”
“Oh, horrors! don’t! I’d rather never be saved,” Lillie answered with a
fervent sincerity.
The story was repeated afterwards as an amusing _bon mot_, and a
specimen of the barbarity to which religious fanaticism may lead; and
yet we question whether John the Baptist had not the right of it.
For it must at once appear, that, had the small-pox made the
above-mentioned change in Lillie’s complexion at sixteen, the entire
course of her life would have taken another turn. The whole world then
would have united in letting her know that she must live to some useful
purpose, or be nobody and nothing. Schoolmasters would have scolded her
if she idled over her lessons; and her breaking down in arithmetic, and
mistakes in history, would no longer have been regarded as interesting.
Clergymen, consulted on her spiritual state, would have told her
freely that she was a miserable sinner, who, except she repented, must
likewise perish. In short, all those bitter and wholesome truths, which
strengthen and invigorate the virtues of plain people, might possibly
have led her a long way on towards saintship.
As it was, little Lillie was confessedly no saint; and yet, if much
of a sinner, society has as much to answer for as she. She was the
daughter and flower of the Christian civilization of the nineteenth
century, and the kind of woman, that, on the whole, men of quite
distinguished sense have been fond of choosing for wives, and will go
on seeking to the end of the chapter.
Did she love John? Well, she was quite pleased to be loved by him, and
she liked the prospect of being his wife. She was sure he would always
let her have her own way, and that he had a plenty of worldly means to
do it with.
Lillie, if not very clever in a literary or scientific point of view,
was no fool. She had, in fact, under all her softness of manner, a
great deal of that real hard grit which shrewd, worldly people call
common sense. She saw through all the illusions of fancy and feeling,
right to the tough material core of things. However soft and tender and
sentimental her habits of speech and action were in her professional
capacity of a charming woman, still the fair Lillie, had she been a
man, would have been respected in the business world, as one that had
cut her eye-teeth, and knew on which side her bread was buttered.
A husband, she knew very well, was the man who undertook to be
responsible for his wife’s bills: he was the giver, bringer, and
maintainer of all sorts of solid and appreciable comforts.
Lillie’s bills had hitherto been sore places in the domestic history of
her family. The career of a fashionable belle is not to be supported
without something of an outlay; and that innocence of arithmetical
combinations, over which she was wont to laugh bewitchingly among her
adorers, sometimes led to results quite astounding to the prosaic,
hard-working papa, who stood financially responsible for all her finery.
Mamma had often been called in to calm the tumult of his feelings on
such semi-annual developments; and she did it by pointing out to him
that this heavy present expense was an investment by which Lillie was,
in the end, to make her own fortune and that of her family.
When Lillie contemplated the marriage-service with a view to going
through it with John, there was one clause that stood out in consoling
distinctness,—“_With all my worldly goods I thee endow._”
As to the other clause, which contains the dreadful word “obey,” about
which our modern women have such fearful apprehensions, Lillie was
ready to swallow it without even a grimace.
“Obey John!” Her face wore a pretty air of droll assurance at the
thought. It was too funny.
“My dear,” said Belle Trevors, who was one of Lillie’s incense-burners
and a bridesmaid elect, “_have_ you the least idea how rich he is?”
“He is well enough off to do about any thing I want,” said Lillie.
“Well, you know he owns the whole village of Spindlewood, with all
those great factories, besides law business,” said Belle. “But then
they live in a dreadfully slow, pokey way down there in Springdale.
They haven’t the remotest idea how to use money.”
“I can show him how to use it,” said Lillie.
“He and his sister keep a nice sort of old-fashioned place there, and
jog about in an old countrified carriage, picking up poor children and
visiting schools. She is a _very_ superior woman, that sister.”
“I don’t like superior women,” said Lillie.
“But you must like her, you know. John is perfectly devoted to her, and
I suppose she is to be a fixture in the establishment.”
“We shall see about that,” said Lillie. “One thing at a time. I don’t
mean he shall live at Springdale. It’s horridly pokey to live in those
little country towns. He must have a house in New York.”
“And a place at Newport for the summer,” said Belle Trevors.
“Yes,” said Lillie, “a cottage in Newport does very well in the season;
and then a country place well fitted up to invite company to in the
other months of summer.”
“Delightful,” said Belle, “_if_ you can make him do it.”
“See if I don’t,” said Lillie.
“You dear, funny creature, you,—how you do always ride on the top of
the wave!” said Belle.
“It’s what I was born for,” said Lillie. “By the by, Belle, I got a
letter from Harry last night.”
“Poor fellow, had he heard”—
“Why, of course not. I didn’t want he should till it’s all over. It’s
best, you know.”
“He is such a good fellow, and so devoted,—it does seem a pity.”
“Devoted! well, I should rather think he was,” said Lillie. “I believe
he would cut off his right hand for me, any day. But I never gave him
any encouragement. I’ve always told him I could be to him only as a
sister, you know.”
“You ought not to write to him,” said Belle.
“What can I do? He is perfectly desperate if I don’t, and still
persists that he means to marry me some day, spite of my screams.”
“Well, he’ll have to stop making love to you after you’re married.”
“Oh, pshaw! I don’t believe that old-fashioned talk. Lovers make a
variety in life. I don’t see why a married woman is to give up all the
fun of having admirers. Of course, one isn’t going to do any thing
wrong, you know; but one doesn’t want to settle down into Darby and
Joan at once. Why, some of the young married women, the most stunning
belles at Newport last year, got a great deal more attention after they
were married than they did before. You see the fellows like it, because
they are so sure not to be drawn in.”
“I think it’s too bad on us girls, though,” said Belle. “You ought to
leave us our turn.”
“Oh! I’ll turn over any of them to you, Belle,” said Lillie. “There’s
Harry, to begin with. What do you say to him?”
“Thank you, I don’t think I shall take up with second-hand articles,”
said Belle, with some spirit.
But here the entrance of the chamber-maid, with a fresh dress from
the dressmaker’s, resolved the conversation into a discussion so very
minute and technical that it cannot be recorded in our pages.